Customer contact centers represent the front line for customer service, marketing operations, and debt collection for many businesses. Typical centers receive or make hundreds of telephone calls, emails, and Internet chat requests per day with the aid of automated telephony and Internet equipment. For instance, predictive dialers such as the MOSAIX Predictive Dialing System (“PDS”) manufactured by Avaya Incorporated automatically dial outbound telephone calls to contact individuals and then transfer the contacted individuals to agents so the agent can talk with the individual.
Devices such as dialing devices, email servers, chat servers, VOIP servers, telephony servers, and web servers allow agents to save time in contacting customers and receiving requests from customers. Dialing devices such as predictive dialers save time for the agent placing the call because the dialing device and not the agent dials the telephone number and agents' time is not wasted with unanswered calls or answering machines. Predictive dialers also spread the outbound telephone calls evenly among all the agents working from the dialing device so that the agents share the workload equally and no agents sit idle while others have too many telephone calls to place. Predictive dialers are also a significant component of customer relationship management (CRM) systems which extend the efficiency gained from predictive dialers to other contact channels such as email and live Internet chat.
Many businesses are increasing their marketing efforts, customer service programs, and bad debt collection efforts by having multiple customer contact centers or call centers or multiple devices located at a single site to serve more customers. Typically, when businesses have multiple sites, the centers are located in different geographic locations which makes coordination of customer contact strategies difficult.
Thus businesses generally manage call centers individually, with separate staffing, calling strategies, goals, and functions. Generally, a contact list is divided into as many parts as there are call centers or dialers with each call center receiving its own section of the calling list. Although this segmentation distributes work, coordination of strategy for outbound calling is difficult since each call center is responsible for its own section of the calling list and has no knowledge of the other call centers' progression with their own calling lists. For instance, if a call center goes down and cannot make outbound telephone calls, the other call centers cannot typically address the downed call center's calling list goals and priorities because the other call centers do not have access to the calling list including the telephone numbers actually called.
A similar problem occurs with a single call center having multiple CRM systems having multiple devices. Work load segmentation typically occurs at a host level, where each device is assigned a portion of the work load. A host downloads the segmented contact list to the individual dialing devices. If one device fails, the other devices do not know the status of the contacts in the failed device's segment.
Difficulties also arise in the routing of outbound calls, call records, or contact records to the agents in a single calling center or multiple calling centers. Typically when routing calls, a call center employs categorization and prioritization routing or load leveling routing. With categorization and prioritization routing, the calls are categorized and prioritized before being sent to the call centers. All of the available call records are organized into distinct groups or pools and each pool of call records is prioritized according to a particular prioritizing scheme. A typical scheme often used at contact centers is to prioritize the inbound calls with the highest priority, live Internet chats second, outbound calls third, and email or other requests last. The agents are segregated into distinct teams and each team receives call records from a particular pool based on the prioritization of the call records.
Load leveling routing of call records allows multiple agent teams to work on the same group or pools of records whether the agents are located in the same call center or if the agents are located across multiple call centers. Load leveling routing eliminates the restriction of categorization and prioritization that requires distinct groups of records for agents not working from the same dialing device. This allows for the movement of call records between the agents and call centers.
However, none of the above call record routing techniques adjusts the agent and pool workload based on the performance or the performance goals of the call record pools. Generally, if a call record pool is not maintaining a desired performance, manual intervention by a system administrator is required to adjust for the under performing call record pool. In order to address the under performing call record pool, agents must move from one team to another in order to have the ability to access call records from the under performing pool and thereby improve the call record pool performance. But this is a slow process that typically results in agent and call center downtime and often cannot be made quickly enough to respond to current call record pool performance.
In addition, such manual intervention decisions to correct under performing call records pools typically require guess work and making decisions without considering all the available options and the effect on the other call record pools. The system administrator must guess as to the effects on the other call record pools when agents are moved from pools maintaining or achieving performance requirements to under performing pools. If agent moves are made incorrectly, then additional pools may start under performing due to the agents that were moved to the under performing pool. Therefore the performance of the call record pools requires constant supervision to ensure that by the end of the calling day the performance requirements for the highest priority pools are satisfied.
Another difficulty with attempts to coordinate calling campaigns across multiple contact device dialers and/or multiple contact calling centers is that a single individual sometimes has multiple accounts that result in multiple contact attempts to the individual for each account. For instance, an individual may have call records for a delinquent account, a marketing account for new sales and a service quality inquiry. As another example, a calling center may have contracts with multiple businesses to contact each business' delinquent accounts and the delinquent accounts of two or more businesses may share common individuals who are delinquent. In such instances, multiple call centers may simultaneously contact or attempt to contact the same individual for the different accounts. An individual targeted by multiple calling centers is more likely to feel harassed and less likely to cooperate or even respond to the call center inquiries. Multiple attempts to contact the same individual by different call centers result in greater outbound call volume and less effective use of outbound calling capacity.
Another difficulty with attempts to coordinate calling campaigns across multiple contact devices is that contact information is often inaccurate or outdated. For instance, with debt collection campaigns debtors generally do not update their contact information and, often, delinquent account holders intentionally avoid contact. Thus, debt collection contact attempts are often made to wrong numbers that are no longer in service or that are no longer associated with the party responsible for the debt. When the contact information associated with a responsible party is outdated or invalid, contact centers use a number of available resources to “skip trace” the responsible party and obtain valid contact information, such as directory assistance or third party'skip tracing services like FASTDATA from FDR. However, each look-up has an associated charge so that call centers generally attempt to control the cost and number of look-ups that are performed. Skip trace look-up costs are typically controlled by consolidating the bad numbers reached throughout a calling day or campaign and querying various skip trace resources manually or with automated batches to obtain numbers for subsequent attempts. In multi-dialer operations, consolidated skip trace look-ups help prevent multiple skip traces of the same responsible party, but tend to reduce the effectiveness of a campaign by restricting the responsiveness of a campaign when bad numbers are identified since subsequent attempts to contact the responsible party after the skip-trace lookup will generally occur in another campaign after the consolidated updates are performed.